Who doesn’t find the idea of an event named Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships (LDRS) intoxicating? The moment I heard it, I was sold. I wouldn’t have cared if the next thing I heard was that LDRS were held on a barren wasteland in the middle of nowhere. Which is a good thing, because that’s the next thing I heard.

Amateur rocketeers are n-n-n-nut-jobs. At least that was my impression of the handful of Rocketry Organization of California (ROC) members with whom I stood shivering in the 3° F-F-F-Fahrenheit February dawn on a vast, windswept expanse of scorched earth in the Mojave Desert, known as Lucerne Dry Lake.

Didrik and I showed up at the Mojave Desert’s Lucerne Dry Lake bright and early for this February morning, Rocketry Organization of California launch. At 3ºF, it was about 50º colder on the lake bed than it had been in Venice when we left. The cold proved merely a short-lived distraction. The rocketeers’ high spirited, high-flying hijinks soon had our complete attention…

Aidan Sojourner and his dad, Cliff, are serious rocketeers. In this vid, they send a 12-foot Nike Smoke screaming into the wild blue over California’s Central Valley. Aidan wants to someday send a rocket to Neptune to retrieve diamonds. I’ve already invested…

Covering rocketeers and amateur model rocketry was the good idea of my publisher Cyrus Krohn. Though I understood people like Burt Rutan were building breathtaking private sector spaceships, I still thought of model rocketry as something done by kids with modest kit rockets. Silly me…